Saturday, February 01, 2020

Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go?

A simple question to corner any Holocaust denier:Where did the Jews considered unfit for work by the Nazis and "evacuated to the East" go?

Figure 1: Map of Europe (google earth satellite image) with
selected political-administrative areas of the Third Reich coloured;
also shown: the number of "evacuated" Jews between June 1941 - April
1943, the number of Jews left as of 1943, partisan populated areas in
the army rear and operation zone as well as the boundary of the
operation zone and Eastern front line in mid-1942.

On 15 December 1942, Adolf Eichmann's RSHA department on Jewish matters, office IV B4, submitted as "Secret State Affair" an "operation and situation report on the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question" (not preserved). Himmler was discontent with the elaboration, which he considered "lacking professional accuracy" (image on the left, microfilm quality). Therefore, he ordered on 18 January 1943 his chief statistician Richard Korherr to take over and analyse the data collected at Eichmann's office (BArch NS 19/1577).

On 23 March 1943, Korherr provided a 16 pages long document "The Final Solution of the European Jewish Question" covering the period up to 31 December 1942 to Himmler. On 19 April 1943, he forwarded to Himmler's staff a shorter summary extending the period covered to 31 March 1943. This short version was meant to get incorporated into a larger (not preserved) report on the Final Solution for
Adolf Hitler by the RSHA (BArch NS 19/1570, scans, text in German/English).

According to Korherr, about 2.6 Million European Jews had been "evacuated" eastwards by the Nazis. Taking into account double-counting, forced labour selections, and transports not destined to the extermination camps Auschwitz, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor, and Treblinka, the figure of Jews "evacuated to the East" between June 1941 and April 1943 not accounted for by Holocaust deniers amounts to about 2.3 Million (see the appendix for details).

Even with combined forces, the Holocaust deniers Carlo Mattogno, Thomas Kues and Jürgen Graf were not able to tackle the issue. In their inverted comma orgy The "Extermination Camps" of "Aktion Reinhardt" [TECOAR], they waffle about Jews fit for work deported through Europe or direct transports to the East but did not explain the fate of the unfit Jews deported to the extermination camps. Graf eventually admits in the epilogue "that we are unable to produce German wartime documents about the destination and the fate of the deportees" (TECOAR, p. 1503).

It's easy to see why the claim that the Jews were not killed in the extermination camps but resettled further East is a lie: according to contemporary German documents, the mass of the "evacuated" Jews did not show up in the occupied Soviet areas under civilian administration, while the military governed areas were partisan populated/endangered and largely free of Jews (map in Figure 1 above).

Holocaust deniers refer to the Pripet Marshes, located in the North of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and the South of the Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien as possible resettlement areas (insinuated by Mattogno, Graf and Kues, Sobibor, TECOAR, p. 597ff.; explicitly mentioned by Steffen Werner, Die zweite babylonische Gefangenschaft).

The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews into the Pripet Marshes in 1942 would have been incomprehensible. The "evacuated" Jews were largely unfit for work and could not have been employed for heavy work in the area.

The Pripet Marshes were also subjected to severe partisan activity. Himmler was scared already by the concentration of less than 30,000 Jews in the Ghetto of Pinsk, which he considered "as the centre of all gang fighting in the Pripet swamps" and ordered "to immediately dissolve and destroy the Pinsk ghetto" in October 1942 (imageon the left, photographed at the exhibition Topographie des Terrors in Berlin).

Another example that partisan areas were as a matter of course cleared of Jews rather than a destination for deportations: on 4 October 1942, the quartermaster of the rear army area 550 (West North-Caucasus region) ordered that "30 Jewish families from the partisan area...are to be deported to Armavir" (NARA, T501/R69). Now if already 30 Jewish families posed a problem for the Nazis - what would 2.3 Million of them be then?

Moreover, during the mass deportations of Jews to Auschwitz, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor, Treblinka, the Generalkommissariat Weissruthenien saw actually a decrease of its
Jewish population - already decimated by the Einsatzgruppen shootings
in 1941 - from 150,000 to 30,000 Jews by April 1943. So instead of taking
up hundreds of thousands of Jews, the authorities worked hard to reduce the Jewish population, including those directly deported from Western parts of Europe. By July 1943, the Reichskommissariat Ostland counted about
72,000 Jews and was ordered to decrease the Jewish population to 50,000. [1]

Likewise, by April 1943, the Reichskommissariat Ukraine was almost free of Jews after the systematic extermination of its remaining Jewish population in 1942 (resulting in the 363,211 Jewish death toll presented by the Higher SS and Police Leader Hans-Adolf Prützmann at the end of 1942).

On 31 December 1942, the Generalkommissar Wolhynien (whose area included a large portion of the Pripet swamps) stated on the "Jewry" that "the cleansing of the area is almost completed" (see also Holocaust Denial & Himmler's Report to Hitler on "Jews executed: 363,211"). By April 1943, the Reichskommissar Ukraine no longer reported on Jews. On 8 July 1943, Adolf Hitler quoted the Gauleiter Erich Koch that "the Jews are all gone". On 25 November 1943, the Hauptmann der Schutzpolizei Josef Ruhr, whose police battalion 306 had been assigned to the Pripet Marshes in the second half of 1942, gave a lecture on the "Battalion's special action to solve the Jewish question. Ukraine free of Jews". [2]

Thus, if deniers' "resettlement" assertion was true, 2.3 Million Jews - mostly unfit for work and useless eaters according to the Nazis - had to be sent to the army rear area. Such a huge population movement into the back of the fighting army - to areas with alarming partisan activity or along the army supply routes - seems incomprehensible both from the Nazis' point of view, who considered the Jews as "dangerous elements", and from that of the military forces. There is also not a shred of evidence for any large scale deportation of unfit Jews and the existence of numerous Jewish camps with the size of Auschwitz in the military-controlled Eastern area (no indication of camps, supplies, guards, survivors, etc.).

The northern military sector around Pskov had been free of Jews by April 1942 and the situation reports of the Befehlshaber im Heeresgebiet Nord from the subsequent months do not mention any Jews or deportation of Jews in the area. Note also that according to the report for August 1942, the Security Police and the army declined the installation of a concentration camp for oil shale works in Slanzy because of lack of guards, materials and workforce. [3]

The Einsatzgruppen had also largely decimated the Jews in the centre military sector. In early 1942, the army counted no more than 22.767 Jews in the military-controlled part of Weissruthenien. More than one year later, by mid-1943, only 1.615 Jews were accommodated in the forced labour camps of Organisation Todt.[4] In addition, the area was heavily populated by partisans. The systematic mass murder of the Jews there was carried out under the pretext of Jews being per definition dangerous elements. Accordingly, it can be ruled out that the Nazis sent a large number of (non-working) Jews into this area.

The southern military sector was also virtually free of Jews according to army reports of areas screened for this posting (i.e. all except those for the oblasts Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia; the Krim can be discarded as deportation target since heavy fighting was going on until July 1942).

About 1.7 Million mostly unfit Jews allegedly "evacuated" eastwards through Auschwitz, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor, and Treblinka did not show up in the East. There is no trace of them after being sent to these camps.

The use of "evacuation" (also "resettlement") to the East was the main cover-up scheme for the genocide of the Jews. The explanation worked up to the gates of the extermination camps, which were run by special forces bound to the highest level of secrecy (see also What's There to Hide? Camouflage and Secrecy of Nazi Extermination Sites). Whether for the Jewish victims themselves or the Jews who stayed back, whether for the local population or the authorities, whether for police forces rounding up and guarding the Jews or train conductors - none did have to officially know any more than the Jews were evacuated to the East (of course, unofficially, the information about the mass murder leaked through by escaped prisoners, outside observers and indiscretion and was all over the place).

In his infamous Posen speech on 4 October 1943, Himmler took up this cover-up scheme when he explained to his leading SS officers frankly that "I am talking about the 'Jewish evacuation': the extermination of the Jewish people".

Holocaust Denial

Most sources in reference [1, 2] have been cited already in Holocaust Controversies' critique
of the deniers Mattogno, Graf & Kues, but were ignored in Kues' chapter
in TECOAR, which failed to clear up the fate of the Jews. While bothering about small groups
of Jews fit for work from Western areas, trainloads of goods and
furniture stolen from Dutch Jews arriving in Vilna and mostly Ukrainian
and Romanian Jews fit for work doing heavy forced labour along the
Durchgangsstraße IV in Ukraine, he totally missed the point that no
masses of Jews evacuated from the mentioned Nazi-controlled areas
appeared in the Reichskommissariate Ostland and Ukraine.

(And
Mattogno? He cared only about irrelevant matters - the way of
citing and the present tense in the first two sentences of Koch's
statement - instead of addressing the content; TECOAR, p.785).

Fun
fact: Steffen Werner suggested in "Die zweite
babylonische Gefangenschaft" (1990) that "the Jews were settled in the
eastern part of White Ruthenia" and "are still held in a kind of
captivity by the Soviet Union today!" Even Jürgen Graf, not exactly the
sharpest knife among "Revisionists", had to admit that Werner's explanation has to be regarded "as impossible" - which is obvious since the Soviet Union
ceased to exist and the hidden Jews did not turn up.

But also the former (no longer active) denier high-flyer
(compared to the rest) Thomas Kues speculated about the lack of
"evacuated" Jews after the war that "a large portion of them, together
with the surviving deported Western Jews, were kept as prisoners behind
the Iron Curtain and most likely deported to and hidden away in northern
Russia or Siberia, so that Stalin could consolidate the myth of the
extermination of Jews in 'gas chambers'" (TECOAR, p.755).

Apparently, Holocaust deniers prefer to make fools out of themselves by advancing even the
most bizarre and nonsensical theories, then to admit the fact that the
Nazis mass murdered the Jews.

In the big picture, there was no place where the Jews, who disappeared in the camps Auschwitz, Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor, and Treblinka, went to during the period of the Nazi reign and occupation. It is a straightforward refutation of the "Revisionist" transit camp claim and poses an existential challenge to Holocaust denial.

For the most part, deniers try to elude the whole issue by discussing only isolated, cherry-picked regions:

When looking at Auschwitz or Kulmhof, the East is supposed to have absorbed all unfit Jews who got lost in these camps. Talking about the 1.25 Million Jews that disappeared in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, they like to point to the Reichskommissariate Ostland and Ukraine as an unlimited reservoir to take up Jews. The decimation of Jews in the Reichskommissariate Ostland and Ukraine is barely mentioned and going on the military-controlled areas along the Eastern front is avoided like the plague by deniers so not give up their last place of retreat.

But if the Jewish population in all regions is taken into account at the same time, the trick to shift missing Jews from one area under discussion into another only treated as a black box does not work anymore. Then the time has come to place all the cards on the table and be frank.

The Jews "unsuitable for work" vanishing from Auschwitz and Kulmhof did not pop up in the Generalgouvernement cause its Jewish population was eliminated only leaving behind forced labourers. The Jews cleared from the Generalgouvernement were not "resettled" into the partisan populated pripet swamps and the Reichskommissariate Ukraine and Ostland, which were depleted of Jews. The Jews gone from these Reichskommissariate were not exchanged between each other or pushed into the back of the fighting Eastern army and the partisan areas, which was largely free of Jews.

It's game over for Holocaust Denial. Again and again.

References

[1] Protocol of a speech of Eduard Strauch of 10
April 1943, Benz, Einsatz im Reichskommissariat Ostland, p. 235; Memo
of 20 August 1943 on a conference of 13 July 1943, NO-1831, Trials
of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, Volume 13, p.
1021.

[5] Situation
report of Befehlshaber Heeresgebiet Don of 7 December 1942 ("Jews have
only been sporadically identified in the army area"); Situation report
of Oberfeldkommandantur Donez of 24 September 1942 ("Significant numbers
of Jews only exist in the Woroschilowgrad area, e.g. in the city of
Woroschilowgrad 1038, in Woroschilowsk around 100."); Situation report
of Feldkommandantur 503 of 12 January 1943 (entry on Jews lacking);
Oberfeldkommandantur 399 of 20 December 1942 (entry on Jews lacking),
situation report of Feldkommandantur 239 of 2 December 1942 ("Otherwise
[apart from one Jewess], as far as could be determined, Jews have so far
not appeared"), situation report of Ortskommandantur 259 of 4 August
1942 ("only two Jews"), situation report of Feldkommandantur 668 of 4
October 1942 ("The Jews identified in the area were evacuated by the
SD"), NARA T501/R19.

Appendix

The Numbers

To keep it simple, the figures on Jewish losses have been
mainly taken
from the reports of the RSHA statistician Richard Korherr.

As
Himmler's statistician was provided only with
deportation and Einsatzgruppen data by Eichmann's
office, a large number of Jewish deaths caused by the National Socialist
policy towards the Jews were not or not explicitly considered in his
study (such as ghetto and camp deaths, shootings and gassings other than those attributed to the
Einsatzgruppen A - D, mass killings of
Jews by the Axis' puppet states). Therefore, the figure of "evacuated"
Jews shall not be confused with an estimate of the total number of
Holocaust
victims up to 1943.

The sum for the Generalgouvernement, the Warthegau, the Reich, other
European countries and the occupied Russian territories amounts to about 2.58 Mio. Jews (2nd column in Table 1).

On the other hand, the records
available to Korherr did not capture forced labour selections among
"evacuated" Jews, double-counted some deportations and included transports to the Ostland. The adjusted figure of
Jews "evacuated" via the extermination camps plus Einsatzgruppen killings is displayed in the 3rd column (about 2.33 Million Jews).

minus Polish transports to Majdanek (12,761; addition from late December 1942 in the Höfle telegram, presumed to be transfers from the Generalgouvernement throughout 1942, Schwindt, Das
Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslager Majdanek, p. 183-186)

minus transports to Ostland (45,212; transport lists from Bundesarchiv Gedenkbuch "Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933-1945" - for the sake of simplicity, this ignores that a significant number of those transports were subjected to direct extermination, e.g. at Maly Trostinez near Minsk).

minus Theresienstadt deportations to Ostland, the Lublin area (w/o direct transports to Treblinka, Sobibor) and registered prisoners in Auschwitz from Theresienstadt transports (22,602; deportation list here and Czech, Kalendarium - the subtraction is done to be on the safe side, assuming Korherr had fully accounted for the Theresienstadt deportations, which is questionable)

The figure for France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Norway, Slowakia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece was adjusted as follows:

The Nazis considered already most of the population of the European Jews as not suitable for work (whether because of antisemitic prejudice, physical state because of poor living conditions in the ghettos, or because they were not to be employed in their trained profession but for heavy forced labour, e.g. road construction and armament industry).

In addition, most of the Jews, who were actually considered fit for work, were excluded from the deportations or taken out from the transports. Thus, the vast majority of Jews
deported to Auschwitz (and not selected in Cosel or registered in the camp), Belzec, Kulmhof, Sobibor and Treblinka were not fit for forced labour in the
eyes of the Nazis. The "evacuations" on the occupied Soviet territory (i.e. killings attributed to the Einsatzgruppen) were instead often carried out on the whole Jewish population.

In the following a number of relevant sources are reproduced.

Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary entry of 27 March 1942:

"From the General Government, starting at Lublin, the Jews are now being deported to the east. A fairly barbaric procedure not to be described in more detail is used, and there is not much left of the Jews themselves. In general, one can say that 60% of them have to be liquidated, while only 40% can still be used for work."

On 23 June 1942, Viktor Brack expressed towards Heinrich Himmler that at least 20-30% of the European Jews can be employed for labour:

"In my opinion, from about 10 million European Jews there are at least 2-3 million men and women very well fit for work. In view of the extraordinary difficulties that the labor question poses to us, I am of the opinion that in any case we should take and maintain these 2-3 million. However, this is only possible if you make them incapable of
reproduction at the same time."

(BArch NS 19/1583)

The Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller estimated with 20 to 30% Jews fit for work (deportations from Bialystok, Theresienstadt, Holland and Berlin to Auschwitz) in a telex to Heinrich Himmler of 16 December 1942:

"The number of 45,000 people who are unable to work (old Jews and children) is included. If an appropriate scale is applied, at least 10,000 to 15,000 workers are required to retire the arriving Jews in Auschwitz."

Memo of the official for population policy in the district Lublin of 27 March 1942:

"1.) It would be useful to divide the Jewish transports coming to the Lublin district into workable and non-workable Jews at the departure station. If this distinction at the departure station is not possible, one might have to proceed to separate the transport in Lublin according to the above-mentioned criteria.

2.) Unfit Jews all come to Belzec, the outermost border station in the Zamosz district."

Minutes of the 5th working meeting of the department heads in Krakow on 11 May 1942:

"As State Secretary Dr. Bühler reports that, according to recent news, the plan is to dissolve the Jewish ghettos, keep the Jews who are fit for work and continue to deport the rest of them to the east."

"The Jewish question is settled in the city of Lublin. The previous Jewish quarter has been evacuated and the able-bodied Jews are housed outside the city in a special district.

[...]

In Radom and Czestochowa, Jewish workers will have to be retained for the armaments industries. Of course, the immediate family members of these workers have to be left behind as well, but everyone else will be resettled."

Letter from the Department of Internal Administration to the SS and police leader Galicia in Lemberg of 12 May 1942:

"Subject: Resettlement of Jews.

As a result of the concentration of nearly 1,100 male Jews from the cities of Sadowa-Wisznia, Grodek, Janow and Jaworow and the surrounding towns, a number of Jewish families have lost their breadwinner. Since the Jewish councils no longer have any welfare funds, the remaining families burden of public welfare of the communities.

In view of the low financial capacity of the municipal administrations that are just being set up, I have to ask to take into account the mentioned towns as far as possible when the resettlements continue and that the Kreishauptmann in Lemberg-Land knows on which day and at which stations wagons can be made available for the removal of the families who have stayed behind and are proposed for resettlement."

"We will take the necessary workforce for this purpose primarily in Auschwitz from the east migration so that our existing company facilities are not disturbed in their performance and structure by a constant change of the workforce. The Jews fit for work migrating to the east will therefore have to interrupt their journey and do armaments work."

Blue swords: Partisan activities in the area of the Befehlshaber des Heeresgebiet Süd in May & June, August 1942, NARA T501/R12, T501/R19, T501/349; Partisan areas according to the map Lage Ost map of 11 May 1942.

Black swords: Partisan activities in the area of the Befehlshaber des Heeresgebiet Mitte in May, September 1942, NARA T501/349, USHMM RG-30.004.

Reichskommissariat Ostland:

see 2nd source of reference [1]

Reichskommissariat Ukraine:

see
reference [2]. The figure of Jews left in Ukraine has been put to <
10,000 to take into account the possibility of closed formations of
forced labour Jews from Hungary and Romania dragged through the area by the respective armies.

12 comments:

You should include on that nice map the areas not in German control with large Jewish populations - such as Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet areas. Then someone won;t look at the map and wonder where the "6 million" came from. It'll be there in the map for later reference.

The "Eastern Territories" were left off the map and are mixed in with what you called "RK Ukraine".

According to the short KR, there were still 233,210 Jews in "Eastern Territories" at the end of '42.

I also think you are double counting with the red areas in your map. KR has 51k in all of the Altreich, 8k in the Ostmark, and 16k in Bohemia and Moravia. You show 43k in "Ostprovinzen". Are you saying there were 43k Jews in Prussia? Where did you get that?

These changes would add about 200k to the map you have shown. Your map has a total of 3,244k Jews altogether. Since you're off by about 200k, that'd be about 3.5 million Jews in your map.

With the addition of Hungary and Romania that'd bring the total up to about 4.5 million Jews altogether in these particular regions - but at least 0.5 million in these areas did not die by war's end.

So you need to show about 2 million more deaths and from where (after '43) they came from by war's end. Otherwise, someone would look at the map you made and not be able to figure a 6 million death toll very easily. The question naturally arises of how many of the approximate 4 million Russian Jews did the Germans come across and how may of those died.

Ostgebiete (Eastern Territories) does not mean the occupied Soviet territories, but the Eastern territories of the Reich. Here is how the figure of 43k is calculated:

233,210 as of 31.12.1942minus 95,112 for the Warthegau, which is already on the mapminus 113,015 evacuated from Ostgebiete and Altreich from 21.12.1942 to 31.3.1943] plus 19,417 evacuated to the East from the Altreich (since not part of the Ostgebiete]minus 1,379 deported from Altreich to Theresienstadt (since decreasing the evacuations to the East from the Altreich)

From the context and placement in the two Korherr reports, when he uses Ostgebiete he is referring to the eingegliederte Ostgebiete. This is apparent because in the 2nd report he lists them as annexed/occupied from 1939 onwards, but also because if the Ostgebiete are bracketed with the Protectorate, Ostmark (Austria) and Altreich, they should be contiguous.

Despite what Deniers claim, the Holocaust is easily falsifiable. Either prove that the "missing" Jews were resettled and not murdered, or prove the so called "Hoax" of the Allied Powers faking the Holocaust. Deniers have failed on both counts. As mentioned in the Article, there's less than Zero evidence of Jews being "resettled" in the USSR or the "Russian East". The very thorough Settlement statistics of the Gulags and colonies make it clear that there were few if any Jews imprisoned in the Gulags during this time. When 1.2M Jews disappeared after being sent to the Reinhard camps, there was no corresponding increase in either the General Soviet Jewish Population or the Population of the Gulags. There are also cases of Jews being moved westwards to the Reinhard camps and Auschwitz, away from the so called "Russian east". Also, since the US and Soviets both glossed over Nazi War crimes and recruited Nazi War criminals, and the UK did the same while continuing to oppress Holocaust survivors, it can safely be said that the Deniers failed to prove the "Hoax".

The Holocaust is falsifiable. Deniers failing to meet the conditions to disprove the Holocaust does not mean it isn't "falsifiable", as they claim.

Denial OTOH is un-falsifiable, because it's based on conspiracy theories and racism. Deniers will never accept any evidence - physical, documentary or testimonial or photographic - because their belief isn't rational but based on paranoia and racism, with a dash of pseudo intellectualism. Deniers believe they are right and everyone else is wrong and frequently alter their conditions for admitting that they are wrong, making their nonsense a textbook example of an unscientific, un-falsifiable claim.